This invention relates to a mower for cutting crop, and particularly to a mower-conditioner.
Conventional mower-conditioners for harvesting hay, which are drawn by a tractor and which are supported on a pair of wheels, have a disc-type cutterbar at the front feeding either a pair of conditioning rolls or a conditioning impeller housed under a hood. The cut and conditioned crop is directed, at the rear of the machine, into a windrow.
For example, it has been proposed in FR-A-2 483 736 to provide a horizontal conveyor, at the rear of a mower-conditioner at a level above support wheels of the machine, which has a working position in which crop falls onto it from conditioning rolls. The conveyor extends diagonally (in plan view) from the hood outlet to terminate behind the left hand wheel and there discharges the crop. The conveyor is mounted for swinging motion about a vertical pivot near its discharge end, and the conveyor can be swung between its diagonal working position just described to a transverse non-working position in which it is spaced sufficiently behind the hood that the crop issuing from under the hood will fall to the ground before reaching it and will simply be laid down in a normal windrow. The machine (with the conveyor in the non-working position) forms such a windrow in a fist pass over the field, and the conveyor is then moved to its working position and a second pass made whereupon the crop is discharged by the conveyor onto, or directly beside, the first windrow so a double windrow is thereby produced.
In the conveyor's working position, some part of the crops tends to miss it leading to losses. In its non-working position, on the other hand, the conveyor is still relatively near the ground so that it may sometimes by fouled by obstructions on the ground over which the machine has to pass.
Furthermore, when in the non-working position, the length of the machine is significantly extended, and indeed the balance of the machine (bearing in mind that it runs just on a pair of support wheels) can be affected.
The present invention enables one or more of these disadvantages to be overcome.